Chameleon Magazine

The world was quiet once, so quiet it frightened even the stones. Beneath the dust, a thousand seeds lay buried, wrapped in sleep. They remembered forests they had never seen, remembered rivers that had not yet flowed. Their shells held the memory of what could be, but no rain softened them, and no hand turned the soil.

Travelers crossed the land and shook their heads. “Dead,” they said. “This place is cursed.” Children threw pebbles at the ground, watching the dust scatter like ghosts. Even the wind refused to linger.

But a few elders sat at the edge of the emptiness and listened. They closed their eyes, and in the silence they heard it: the faint hum of waiting, the heartbeat of something not gone but hidden.

“This is no grave,” they whispered. “This is a breath held. The land is gathering itself. When the sky loosens its water, when a hand tends the earth, the silence will break into song.”

And so the seeds slept, not dead but patient, keeping their promise in the dark.

“What seems absent may only be waiting.”